SetPoint/iType – Media Keys

I’m sad to say one of my favorite audio players ever had its sunset notice earlier last month. (OutcoldPlayer)

It was a Google Music Player that used the internal API and its own machinations to make sure the DRM audio is protected as would be on the actual Google Play Music service.

I’m stuck using the crappy Google Chrome Web Application for Google Play Music again… blek! I’m not a huge fan. While Google DID make the media-keys Global (meaning if your keyboard has play, stop, next, previous media keys… they should work) some time ago… Logitech (the main brand of keyboard I buy) hasn’t really bothered to fix their obvious bugs in SetPoint. A wrapper of sorts for the drivers of their devices. It works well enough, I’ve personally never had issue with it outside of Media Keys.

Well I have found a solution that… sadly may get smashed on the next update of SetPoint, but should help folks in similar circumstances needing their Logitech to work with Google Chrome’s Global Media Keys.

There is a file in a directory:C:\Program Files\Logitech\SetPointP\players.ini
and this is where 100% of the magic happens for this little hack of ours.

This file has a large amount of Media Players already configured for it… and since my hack is mainly functioning guesswork you should tack the following edits near the bottom of each
[Section] of the INI file.

You’ll have to close SetPoint from the task manager or exit it from the context-menu via the notification icons on your Windows Taskbar.

Open “Mouse and Keyboard Settings”, should be a green icon. Open up the Keyboard menu, you’ll see Google Play Music in the list of media players.

Note: I couldn’t get the dang thing to open Play Music directly; but this little hack will allow you to use your keyboard’s Media Keys with SetPoint running and should work with both Windowed and Tabbed instances of the Google Play Music.

Now… for Microsoft.

I found that you can actually assign macros to keys. So using the Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center, is set the macros to the corresponding files in the%UserProfile%\Documents\Microsoft Hardware\Macros\ directory.
(Download Zip with mhm files)

True Media Previous.mhm

XHTML

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<?xml version="1.0"encoding="UTF-8"?><Macro>

<KeyBoardEvent Down="true">57360</KeyBoardEvent>

<DelayEvent>10</DelayEvent>

<KeyBoardEvent Down="false">57360</KeyBoardEvent>

</Macro>

True Media Next.mhm

XHTML

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<?xml version="1.0"encoding="UTF-8"?><Macro>

<KeyBoardEvent Down="true">57369</KeyBoardEvent>

<DelayEvent>10</DelayEvent>

<KeyBoardEvent Down="false">57369</KeyBoardEvent>

</Macro>

True Media PlayPause.mhm

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<?xml version="1.0"encoding="UTF-8"?><Macro>

<KeyBoardEvent Down="true">57378</KeyBoardEvent>

<DelayEvent>10</DelayEvent>

<KeyBoardEvent Down="false">57378</KeyBoardEvent>

</Macro>

Enjoy, and leave comment if this helped you out!

Comments (24)

Holy hell, thx for the macros. I’ve been stuggling to get the media keys working on my sidewinder x4 for years (ever since swapping over to gMusic from my music player). As a note, I replaced Microsoft’s Mouse & Keyboard app with Microsoft’s IntelliType. Once completed, I opened intellitype and selected each macro for the specified media key and it worked like a charm. thanks a bunch…no more ending the itype process or running chrome in admin mode!!!!

The reason it likely isn’t working with Google Music opened in its own window (assuming you’re using Chrome of course) is likely because you need to enable the Google Music extension found here.

Once that is configured navigate to chrome://extensions/ and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and click “Keyboard Shortcuts”. Find the Media Keys for Google Music and set them using your Logitech enabled media keys.

I’ve been on Windows 10 for about a month now, and I have not had any problems with these SetPoint settings. Though that chrome extension is questionable some of the time.

I know this will likely never get back to you, seeing as you used an invalid email.

I separate my titles, because much like yourself I don’t feel that nearly 100% competence in .NET warrants a programmer the title of web developer, nor the merits of self-proclaiming such as an expert level understanding.

I learned PHP and web-development LONG before I got into .NET, it’s always been a passion. I work .NET at my 9-5 then come home and work on PHP sites, NodeJS platforms and front-end frameworks. I’ve even bettered myself in recent years and picked up Python and RoR (though I would hardly qualify myself expert in either).
Hell, I’ve even recently made a hybrid phone-app using Ionic which allowed me to apply my knowledge of AngularJS.

Also, Mr. Anonymous Coward; .NET isn’t proprietary anymore, parts of it have become OSS, eventually all of it will be…

ALSO, I don’t have clients. lol. The last client I had was… 2 years ago. I almost exclusively work on my own SaaS products that I plan on bringing to market in the foreseeable future.

Awesome man thanks for sharing, worked great with my msft natrual ergo 7000 keyboard. Where did you find the KeyBoardEvent Id’s used? I tried looking them up to assign macros for liking/disliking tracks but couldn’t find a lookup table to reference.

In setpoint I don’t have a green icon for starters, it’s sort of blue, and there is no list of media players under the keyboard settings. Is this a newer version? I put the edits in the ini file but not sure if I used the correct spacing, or if that’s important? I couldn’t navigate the file very easily as I only opened it in notepad, so the layout wasn’t like the code above. Also had quite a few differences. Any help would be highly appreciated! Thank you.

this worked really well. I just opened the players.ini file in word pad and pasted exactly like you said. I have a k360 keyboard and my setpoint software doesn’t have everything that you described. but when I closed setpoint and reopened it google play music worked fine after the hack. great work and thanks so much!

Great post! I’m managed partial success with my K330 keyboard. I was able to update the players.ini file to get “Google Play Music” listed in the Keyboard and Mouse Center and assigned to the Media Key (though it just opens and empty new Chrome window).

The other Media keys (Play/Pause, Next & Previous) buttons now register when I assign them to the Chrome Extensions Keyboard Shortcuts configuration menu. But they still don’t work to actually control the music playback.

I’m going to have to revisit this… the method only works in part now. I’m thinking of creating some sort of utility to inject the required registry values (with security-conscience alternatives) and the linesin the player.ini.

I’m still thoroughly annoyed both Logitech and Microsoft don’t have enough forethought to support web-based music streaming. Hound me about this or I’ll forget. 😛

The settings for Logitech work fine. I had been in conversation with Logitech support to fix this problem and going through the usual investigative steps which were unlikely to discover the problem which should have been obvious to them, given how the .ini file works. Then I found this webpage. I have asked them (optimistically) to include this in a future release of Setpoint. I will pray every day! Meanwhile, thanks for a clear and easy fix.

thanks very much for this! i was skeptical that it would work 3+ years later, but it absolutely did. i’m not sure why it worked out-of-the-box on Win7 without SetPoint installed, but Win10 required this hack.

It’s because SetPoint “wraps” the keypress of a media key on their keyboards to be different then what Windows expects (namely Win10).
The hack is just forcing the key to be Windows Media Key strokes in context to the Music App (when it’s open).

Sadly, this is going to die off eventually because Logitech doesn’t seem to be doing much more with SetPoint. They’re using Logitech
Options now, and it doesn’t seem to have this flexibility.